Episodes
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Singapore’s Land Transport Authority has reached the half-way mark for completing its Circle Line Stage 6, which closes the Circle Line loop by connecting HarbourFront to Marina Bay stations. We take a look at the recently completed tunnelling works for CCL6.
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This week we are taking you to Virginia and looking at The Big Walker and East River Mountain Tunnels, which burrow through the Appalachian Mountains and cross the border between two states. This impressive project completed 50 years ago, and was the most expensive construction job that West Virginia Department of Highways and Virginia Department...
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If the Ancient Egyptians had made use of nuclear fuel, their engineers would have needed to find a solution to store the waste not just to today, but far into the future. Fortunately, modern engineers are up to the task. The most advanced project for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel is ‘Onkalo’ in Finland. ...
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A career spent in the evolving field of ventilation has yielded a number of insights to Mosen’s Fathi Tarada. In this episode we tell the story of how the Bahrain oil industry is to thank for a man fighting to bring tunnelling closer to Net Zero, how new ventilation technologies could influence tunnel design, and...
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High Speed 2 is the UK’s latest transport megaproject. Billed as the largest ever investment in the country’s rail, its first phase will link London in the south via 230km of high-speed rail with Birmingham in the West Midlands. With a focus on innovation and new technologies available, the project is determined to avoid the...
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Faced with a need to free surface space for their expanding town, and a reliance on the local quarry for foundation material, the people the town of Drammen in Norway came up with a unique solution. A spiral tunnel would provide all of the granite they needed, would allow them to close the quarry, and...
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Vienna, the capital city of Austria is also known worldwide as The City of Music and this musical metropolis is fine tuning the way that it constructs underground. In order to expand its metro system it has turned to the use of hydraulic props to hold back the pressure from the earth during construction of...
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Brisbane has an Achilles heel. But luckily, it is one that engineers are on the verge of correcting. As the capital of Queensland, a resource-rich state in Australia’s northeast, it is a vital hub for the economy and the movement of people around the country. The problem lies with the iconic river that bears the...
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In this episode we join Yannis Vazaios on site in North Acton, London. Yannis is a Geotechnical Engineer working on High Speed 2’s Victoria Road site as the designer’s representative. But this story begins 15 years ago in Athens. Yannis finds himself taking a degree he did not expect but nonetheless is falling in love...
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The San Fernando Earthquake of 9 February 1971 caught experts completely off-guard. The event galvanised a generation of engineers, and improvements are still being made today that can be traced back to that one day. One recognisable figure from the tunnelling industry today, was still in education at the time. He had earned his bachelor’s...
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Every good superhero universe has its origins story. Hagerbach’s begins with Rudolf Amberg, looking to innovate and find new efficiency savings for his iron mine. So began a 50-year journey from testing equipment and explosives, to fire and tunnel safety simulations, and ever more creative uses for underground space. Ultimately the mining industry in Switzerland...
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Mechanisation is the most reliable way to ensure the safety of workers in any construction underground. In this episode we look at the growth in mechanised methodologies for shaft-sinking And this technology has its origins in the 1970s, but it is one that has seen a surge in interest over the last two decades… and...
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This is the third and final episode of our three-part special looking at the delivery of megaprojects. In this episode we examine the lessons learned from two of the most iconic tunnelling projects of recent times: London’s Crossrail and New York’s East Side Access. Crossrail was the largest infrastructure project in Europe. Weaving in and...
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Our sister podcast Engineering Matters produced this three-part special looking at the delivery of megaprojects to mark its 100th episode. In this second episode, we look at how a client can assess the scale of the task of delivering an impossibly complex scheme, such as a megaproject and supplement gaps in its skillset with industry...
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Megaprojects are among the most complex and challenging of society’s undertakings. Each is grand is scope and due to the scale, none are ever built twice. Although they leverage the resources and political will of a nation, most encounter cost and schedule overruns, damaging reputations and souring public support. Our sister podcast Engineering Matters produced...
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A career spent working on, teaching about, and investigating trenchless projects in Canada has given one geotechnical engineer decades of lessons and anecdotes to draw on. He now finds himself an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, and Executive Director of the Centre for...
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The Thames Tunnel, an 11m wide, 6m high and 396m long tunnel cuts 23m under the river Thames when measured at high tide. It is the first known tunnel to be excavated under a navigable river. And most critically for today’s episode it is the first use of a tunnelling shield, which some 200 years...
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Set in the West Midlands county of Staffordshire is a former Royal Forest called Cannock Chase. It is part misty, secluded woodland and part undulating moorland. As you head up to the north of this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the landscape becomes tame and you enter the Shugborough Estate, some 10km to the east...
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Kathmandu is set in a bowl valley in the foothills of the Himalayas. It has more heritage sites than any other city in the world and is the economic powerhouse for the developing nation of Nepal. It has a bustling society and an irreplaceable culture, but what it does not have is a public transport...
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Right now companies around the world are competing in a global race to prove that a new transport revolution is just a few years away. Using high speed transit through low pressure tubes speeds of 1100km/hr per hour are theoretically possible, bringing cities closer together than ever before. Elon Musk who kickstarted the industry naming...
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